comparative cognition laboratory

News

One of our latest papers has made the front cover of Current Zoology!! (That picture of the noisy miner bird opening a feeder on the bottom left of the cover was one of my little guys - happily released back to the wild after the study was finished!).

In this paper we critique and challenge some of the basic assumptions that underpin research into human and animal cognition.

We argue that too much emphasis has been placed on allowing logistically convenient, artificial laboratory tasks to define and categorise the cognitive mechanisms we identify and study. We suggest that theory-driven considerations about the structure and nature of animal cogntion should drive the types of paradigms designed to investigate, instead of the other way around.